Posts
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. ~review
About the Author
Born in Bombay in 1952, Rohinton Mistry immigrated to Canada in 1975. He began writing stories in 1983 while attending the University of Toronto. Rohinton Mistry's first novel, Such a Long Journey, creates a vivid picture of Indian family life and culture as well as tells a story rich in subject matter, characterization and symbolism. It is set in 1971 Bombay, when India went to war over what was later to become Bangladesh. Such a Long Journey was made into a movie in 2000, starring Om Puri and Roshan Seth.
A Fine Balance won the L.A. Times Book Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Canada's prestigious Giller Prize and was a 1996 Booker Prize Finalist.
A Look Inside Bombay
India is known as the home of the vasectomy, with the Indian government claiming to have performed the most amount of vasectomies, than any other nation. In 1973 over 7 million vasectomies were performed in India due to cash initiative schemes. In the Gorakhpur vasectomy camp in India in 1972 there were at least fourteen cases of tetanus infection. This led to the first reported deaths due to vasectomy - eight of them were described in the Times of India. ~website
The train stations in Bombay are crowded…One needs to be physically fit to do the daily commute by train. People travel hanging out of trains, sitting on top of trains, and there are casualties every day."
The problem of homelessness is worse now than in 1975, because the population has almost doubled. There must be twice as many people living on pavements, in slums and in rudimentary dwellings.
